Sustainable Innovation Challenge

---

The goal was simple but ambitious: to create one original sustainability innovation concept per day; not just for a year, but until the challenge was fully realized. I started on May 24, 2023 and completed it on January 28, 2025, with 365 actionable innovation concepts that span energy, water, food, materials, AI, biodiversity, and beyond.

Born from my experience as a cleantech founder, designer and engineer, and endurance athlete, this challenge tested not just creativity, but discipline, foresight, and my belief that sustainability must become the default framework for innovation.

Each concept explores overlooked possibilities and anticipates future crises, while aligning with the UN Sustainable Development Goals. I hope the Challenge and the methodology beyond it are blueprints for action, rooted in feasibility, imagination, and systems transformation.

The challenge became the foundation of my upcoming book, Imagine Next. .Today, as an early stage climate tech investor and systems strategist, this challenge continues to guide how I source, evaluate, and support the next wave of planet-positive solutions.

I started the Sustainable Innovation Challenge on May 24, 2023.

The inspiration for the 365 Sustainable Innovation Challenge came from recognizing the urgent need to rethink how we approach innovation, particularly in sustainability. With the world at a critical crossroads, I felt compelled to act after seeing a study highlighting the paradox of growing knowledge but fewer disruptive breakthroughs. My background in endurance sports like marathons and Ironmans, along with my experience in sustainable innovation (from R&D, startups to collaborating with various innovation ecosystems and some projects I co-initiated) motivated me to create this challenge. It pushes my creativity to its limits while contributing to real-world solutions, fostering a culture of sustainable innovation, collaboration, and impactful change.

I maintain a record of my daily innovation concepts on my Instagram account (@julia.daviy), as well as in my Evernote and Google Drive for consistency. Posting the concepts on my website typically requires a bit more time.

Coming up with fresh ideas isn’t about waiting for inspiration — it’s about learning how to catch sparks.
During my 365 Sustainable Innovation Challenge, I built a system for doing exactly that. It began as a mix of design thinking, systems thinking, and startup experience — but evolved into something more intuitive and alive. Instead of simply observing problems, I trained myself to notice the sparks — those flashes of potential hidden in ordinary moments. I’d capture them quickly, research their context as deeply as time and AI tools allowed, and turn them into hypotheses for solutions that could work in the real world.

Conversations with clean tech professionals, UC Berkeley colleagues, and my own hands-on work — from co-founding green startups to developing portable solar chargers — continuously fueled this process.

By weaving sustainability, technology, and economics together with imagination, I learned how to transform small sparks into actionable, high-impact concepts. This approach isn’t reserved for a few — anyone can learn to cultivate it. Once you build the discipline to notice, catch, and develop sparks, innovation becomes a daily practice — and a way to create a truly planet-first future.

Sustainability isn't just my professional focus, it's deeply personal. A decade ago, I took on a one-year challenge to live the most eco-friendly lifestyle possible. This experience revealed numerous pain points and untapped market opportunities, leading me to create my own line of organic clothing. That journey ultimately paved the way for my innovations in sustainable 3D-printed fashion and fully digital supply chains and delivery (something that we tried to implement in Imageneria).

For me, an innovation concept is the seed of transformation. It’s a structured idea that asks: what if? In design and research, concepts are the way we explore possibilities, imagine new systems, and communicate vision before something exists in the world.

Sustainable innovation means creating solutions that don’t just work today, but also safeguard tomorrow. Scientists and policymakers often define it as innovations that reduce environmental harm and create long-term social and economic value. I see it as going a step further: innovations that actively regenerate ecosystems, empower communities, and help us shift into a future where growth and survival are no longer at odds.

Sustainable innovation concept is where my challenge lives. It's an early idea that combines inventiveness with responsibility. It’s about daring to imagine bold solutions, whether technological, systemic, or social, while grounding them in sustainability principles. Each concept I share is a glimpse of what could be possible if we design with both imagination and accountability to the planet.

For every concept in the Sustainable Innovation Challenge, I followed a disciplined process designed to turn attention into actionable innovation:

1. Catch the spark
   Notice a signal: a failure in a system, an unmet human or ecological need, a stress point in energy, water, materials, food, biodiversity, governance, or equity. The spark is not “an idea.” The spark is a problem worth solving.
    
2. Research it
   Map what already exists. I review how the problem is currently being addressed in science, patents, policy, startups, infrastructure, and practice. The goal here is not inspiration. It’s immersion: how are serious actors trying to solve this, and where are they running into limits?
    
3. Identify the gaps
   Surface what isn’t being solved — technical gaps, economic gaps, ethical gaps, deployment gaps, scale gaps. Where does the current approach quietly shift harm instead of eliminating it? Where is there no pathway for people or nature to actually benefit?
    
4. Imagine solutions
   Design a response that directly targets that gap. This is where I use my background in climate tech, manufacturing, systems design, and policy to generate a solution that could exist — not sci-fi for its own sake, but a plausible next move in the real world.
    
5. Commit it to form
   Each solution becomes a structured concept: the problem, how it works, its impact (including SDG alignment), who it serves, and how it could be deployed. Many were also sketched visually to force clarity.
    

The original goal was 365 concepts in 365 days. The reality was 365 concepts in 616 days.

That matters. It proves this is not a “streak of ideas.” It’s an applied method for planetary problem-solving: catch the spark → research it → identify the gap → imagine the solution → make it concrete.

This is the core of my work: imagination as a reproducible tool for designing systems that serve life.

During the challenge, I often shared the very first iterations of what I could create in a single day. Working on the book, I returned to each of these early sketches with deeper research, sharper analysis, and greater discipline. In many cases, the concepts grew into far more refined, distinctive, and powerful solutions. In a fast-moving innovation space, overlaps are inevitable: sometimes my ideas converged with what companies later built. To me, that isn’t a weakness, but proof of foresight. What defines this work is rethinking and advancing them beyond the frontier of what already exists.